Opinion

Herzog at 50

June 2, 2014

Roger Cohen

LONDON — There are books one has read, or believes one has, but they are read too soon or too late and so carry no weight. No emotional frame in which to fit them exists. Some novels, like Malcolm Lowry’s “Under the Volcano,” seem ripe at any age. Others, like Lawrence Durrell’s “The Alexandria Quartet,” lose their precocious luster. Still others lie dormant until chance revives them at an opportune moment.

During a recent conversation about life after a long marriage, in what at a stretch may still be called middle age, a friend said of my unanchored state, “Yeah, Herzog.” I was sure I had read the novel, I had my Saul Bellow season long ago, but his comment lodged in my mind. A few days later, on a whim, I bought “Herzog” on the 50th anniversary of its publication.

The opening line is well known: “If I am out of my mind, it’s all right with me, thought Moses Herzog.” From there Bellow weaves the extraordinary tale of his hero Herzog’s madness, which is not quite that, capturing, in a prodigious flow of verbal energy, the longings, the jealousy, the passions, the fury, the ideas, the joys, the nostalgia and the loneliness of a 47-year-old man whose second marriage has just ended and finds himself adrift between New York, Chicago and a house in the Berkshires.

The plot is anything but linear. It follows the time leaps and zigzags of Herzog’s mind. It does not flow; it eddies irresistibly. The novel is written from the inside out in a frenzy of imaginative sympathy, switching from third-person to first-person narration, and from past to present (Herzog has reached that life fulcrum where the past becomes overwhelming).

Herzog is an academic who has earned renown as a historian of romantic ideas. He is attractive but shambolic, impulse-driven. His mind never rests: “The pulses in his skull were quick and regular, like the tappets of an engine beating in their film of dark oil.” His second wife, Madeleine, has dumped him for that “effing peg-leg” Valentine Gersbach, erstwhile neighbor and friend. Madeleine is icy, emasculating and brilliant. She is vengeful and extravagant. Bellow’s evocation of the marriage’s unraveling is ferocious and funny, not least as Herzog recalls a conversation when Madeleine was pregnant:

“Five hundred bucks on a maternity outfit. Who’s going to be born — Louis Quatorze?”

“Yes, I know, your darling mother wore flour sacks.”

She did, indeed. Herzog knows where he came from, his family having arrived in the United States from Canada “filthy with the soot,” still in touch with the “ancient Herzogs with their psalms and their shawls and beards.” That world is gone, but replaced by what? In the void, Herzog has moments of quixotic self-belief: “The revolutions of the twentieth century, the liberation of the masses by production, created private life but gave nothing to fill it with. This was where such as he came in. The progress of civilization — indeed, the survival of civilization — depended on the successes of Moses E. Herzog.”

Then the emptiness returns. He plots the murder, briefly, of Madeleine and Valentine. He finds sexual consolation with Ramona, his present flame, but flees her periodically. He muses, “The Jews were strange to the world for a great length of time, and now the world is being strange to them in return.” He fires off missives of pyrotechnic brilliance and spleen — to Spinoza, Eisenhower, Adlai Stevenson and Tolstoy, among others; Tolstoy, whose idea of freedom is personal: “That man is free whose condition is simple, truthful — real. To be free is to be released from historical limitation.”

But his times press on Herzog — “In a city. In a century. In transition. In a mass. Transformed by science. Under organized power. Subject to tremendous controls. In a condition caused by mechanization. After the late failure of radical hopes. In a society that was no community and devalued the person. Owing to the multiplied power of numbers which made the self negligible. Which spent military billions against foreign enemies but would not pay for order at home. Which permitted savagery and barbarism in its own great cities.”

Yes, Bellow wrote that more than 50 years ago. Like much in “Herzog” it takes the breath away.

This is life: a serendipitous meeting, a conversation, a novel that consumes the mind, sparks ideas and brings joy, the irrepressible renewal of hope. If I had already read the novel I had read it at the wrong time. The right time was now, this minute.

Herzog has no great epiphany. His “balance comes from instability.” But he can laugh, always, dance (to Polish music), create. The words that cascade from him are a life force, his unquenchable humanity. At the last he prepares a candlelit country dinner for Ramona. He is emptied out: “He had no messages for anyone. Nothing. Not a single word.”